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Using
Outlook
to Count Responses
March 2004
Here's
a productivity tip that will save you a lot of time and trouble
if you need to collate responses from staff for any reason,
especially if you work for an organisation with a lot of staff.
Case
Study: I worked for a financial institution with 3,000 plus
employees and had to identify how many employees needed compulsory
training in certain legislation so that we could plan and resource
the training.
I
emailed everyone within the centre with a request that if they
had not completed the training within the last three
months, they were to reply to my email without changing the
subject line. They were to reply by a certain deadline ... any
queries were to be sent via a new email addressed to me and
I explained why.
I
created a folder called 'Legislation Training' and used Rules
Wizard to divert any email received with the subject line: 'Legislation
Training Requirement' into the folder. Every time a new email
arrived it automatically went into the folder and Outlook incremented
and displayed the number of unopened emails in the folder in
brackets at the end of the folder name. It looked like this
Legislation Training (125).
By
the deadline all I had to do was look at the end of the Legislation
Training folder to see how many people needed the training.
No counting ... all done automatically by our productivity tool
Outlook 2002.
As
the fast talking salesman on the television said, 'And there's
more!'
When
I was asked for a list of the names of those who had responded,
all I had to do was export the Legislation Training folder emails
to MS Excel. Excel allows you to choose the fields you export.
I chose the 'From' field and finished up with a list of names
since all email addresses were in the format WILLIAMS Royston.
Once in Excel it was a simple matter to sort them into alphabetical
order.
Not
only that, I could now email 20 people at a time and advise
them when and where they had to attend this mandatory training.
This
is an excellent way to deal with large numbers of people and,
although Outlook does have options for creating forms with yes/no
buttons and so on in them, it is more complex than this option.
I
hope this short article has been of interest to you and that
it helps you increase your sales.
To
your success.
Robin Henry
Principal Adviser, Publisher and Entrepreneur since 1998
DESERT WAVE ENTERPRISES
ABN 61763021714
PO Box 2361
Alice Springs 0871
Northern Territory of Australia
P: +61 8 89534409
F: +61 8 89534409
W: http://www.dwave.com.au
http://winagovtjob.com
E: query
Copyright 2003 Robin Henry
This item may be freely reproduced or linked to a newsletter
or other item, provided it is not sold and that it is reproduced
in its entirety. If you wish to use it, please email
me a copy of the link where it will be displayed or send me
a copy of your ezine.
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